


The Moons of Skaia

by Elizabeth Culmer (edenfalling)



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Space, Gen, Ladystuck 2014, Women Being Awesome, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-13
Updated: 2015-01-13
Packaged: 2018-03-07 09:32:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,461
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3169940
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/edenfalling/pseuds/Elizabeth%20Culmer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Twelve sweeps after the Collapse, Justiciar Redglare came to the moons of Skaia on the trail of Her Imperious Condescension.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Moons of Skaia

**Author's Note:**

  * For [chthonianCrocuta (lovesthesoundof)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lovesthesoundof/gifts).



> Dear [chthonianCrocuta](http://archiveofourown.org/users/lovesthesoundof/pseuds/chthonianCrocuta), I fell in love with all your prompts and couldn't decide which one to write at the expense of the others, so I kind of mashed several of them together. I hope the results aren't too much of a Frankenstein's monster. :)

Twelve sweeps after the Collapse, Justiciar Redglare came to the moons of Skaia on the trail of Her Imperious Condescension.

The Alternian cruiser stopped at the ring of debris that marked the system's heliopause and transferred passengers -- traders, refugees, pleasure seekers, students: drifters one and all, whatever their reasons -- to a swarm of smaller in-system ships that could safely navigate the jagged and radioactive remnants of ancient battlefields. Redglare paid the minimum fee without care for her destination and wound up on a repurposed asteroid tug whose rustblood pilot-proprietor claimed the second-largest moon, Lolar, as her homeport.

Redglare doubted her quarry would have the courtesy to be on the first moon she checked, let alone near a major spaceport, but all hunts began somewhere. If nothing else, Lolar reputedly had something at least vaguely approximating an organized government, which could not be said for places such as Lofaf or Lomax. It was much easier to make inquiries with the shadow of the law looming behind her, even if only by vague implication.

The journey inward took five standard nights. Skaia swam into sight midway through the fourth aftermidnight and grew until it swallowed the entire viewport, its banded blue and white clouds shining in the glare of its white-hot star. Twice, moons crawled across its surface, reflecting and swallowing light according to their own nature: the dark, broken highlands of Lotak piercing through its layered clouds, and the ceaseless tidal volcanoes and lava flows of Lohac shining like open wounds.

There were varying theories on the improbability of all eight major moons naturally developing breathable atmospheres, and also on what, exactly, had shattered all known attempts to conquer the system by force. Most boiled down to, in the words of Redglare's most recent informant, "Somebody did it. I don't know who, I don't know how, and I hope to fuck I never run into them. But if you want to hide, there's no better place in the galaxy."

Fortunately, Redglare was good at finding things.

As for _holding_ what she caught...

She ran her fingers across the smooth skin of her throat, touching the rope scar that wasn't there -- that had never been there, in this world, in this life.

Well. She'd learned a few tricks since she died.

\---------------

The other six passengers were students from a minor colonial university, too young to remember any universe but the current one. They held long and intense philosophical discussions in the mess room, lightly tossing about ideas that would have meant instant death under the old laws.

Redglare avoided them, more interested in combing through the few hints of her target's movements she'd been able to gather. After the first night, they returned the courtesy, not finding her worth the trouble to draw out.

On the fifth night, she dressed in her uniform and stood in the control room airlock as they approached Lolar, and listened as the tug's pilot spoke accented English to the port control tower. Redglare only caught one word in three, and missed the jokes entirely if the pilot's laughter was any guide.

She felt old. Misplaced.

She supposed it was common enough among those who came through the Collapse.

The tug plunged downward through the dense clouds on the moon's shadowed hemisphere, then burst through into the clear brilliance of combined sunlight and Skaia-shine. Beneath the ship, a shallow, glinting sea spread across the surface, broken by myriad islands and archipelagoes rather than true continents.

"Wow," one of the students breathed from behind Redglare's shoulder. "It's so different from Aquila-Four. I can't believe I get to live here for a full sweep."

"Life is often unbelievable," Redglare said.

The student -- a brownblood, young enough to have a few residual streaks of gray in her eyes -- laughed cheerfully. "It really is! I never thought I'd be lucky enough to get accepted into this program. But if you want to study interspecies cultural transmission patterns, the Skaian Federation's the best place. Nowhere else gets more than about three species rubbing horns together, and even those are mostly majority-something with little ghetto enclaves. Skaia, though. Skaia's incredible."

"So I hear." Redglare turned and offered a half-smile, charmed despite herself by the student's enthusiasm. "Do your best to keep that perspective even if your teachers and lessons prove less than perfect."

"Hey, Almira, come get your stuff ready for landing!" one of the other passengers called from further back in the ship.

"Coming!" the student shouted. Then she turned back to Redglare. "Thank you, and good luck with your hunt, Justiciar."

Redglare watched her lope back to her companions, all of them overflowing with excitement at the chance to meet new people and learn new things. "Luck," she said to herself, "is irrelevant." The universe did as it wished. What mattered was how people reacted, and that had nothing to do with chance.

Shortly thereafter, the tug landed in Rainveil, a sprawling muddle of islands and lagoons that asymptotically approached the idea of a city. The pilot set her ship down on a heat-scarred landing field, waited while a gaggle of humans and chelonians maneuvered a transfer trailer under its belly, then retracted the landing struts and let them tow her off to a hangar. Once inside, she unplugged herself from the helms-rig, opened the hatch, talked the ground crew into maneuvering an extendable ramp flush with the seal, and waved her passengers out.

Nobody was waiting to inspect them. The students milled around for a few minutes, confused, before one of the ground crew, a chelonian with an elaborately painted shell, took pity on them and showed them how to access a local map on their handheld computing devices. "If you want a float for your luggage, we can sell you one cheap," she added in oddly pitched Alternian Standard, her voice eerie, high, and fluting.

"No rentals?" the brownblood student asked.

The chelonian shook her wrinkled head, the edges of her beak crinkling slightly in a simulated smile. "How'd we get it back? You don't want to keep it once you get wherever you're going, just sell it on to someone else. Standard rate is ten boonbucks for a mini, twenty-five for cargo size. Long as you don't expect a profit, you'll be fine."

The students conferred, then purchased a mini-float, loaded their belongings in a precariously balanced pyramid, and trudged off toward the nearest ferry station.

Redglare considered riding with them. According to her research, the local police headquarters, such as they were, lay in the same general direction as the Rainveil Polytechnic University, and she needed to report her arrival and arrange for recognition of her credentials. But there would be other ferries and it wasn't as if recognition would do much for her de facto authority, since the Skaian Federation had no extradition treaties with any other power.

Besides, she didn't need a license to be nosy.

In her experience, ports always had seedy bars and small shops where people could purchase items of questionable legality. Right now, she badly needed a drink. And if Meenah Peixes had held true to form, there was no better place to catch her trail than the docks.

She retrieved a few necessary items from her luggage, then paid the ground crew fifteen boonbucks to store her things in one of the port's cargo warehouses for two solar nights. She had no idea if that fee included a lock or a guard, but she traveled light and had confidence in her ability to track and retrieve any of her possessions that found their way into Lolar's apparently exuberant marketplace.

Redglare whistled as she strolled away from the spaceport and down toward the water's edge, her swordcane tapping cheerfully on the cobbled street. Now and then she paused to ask directions from fellow pedestrians, straining her tongue and squawk-box to produce alien sounds if their Alternian was poor. She received more direct answers than she'd expected -- still vague, but not buried in riddles and cant and local idiom -- and calibrated her course toward the precise establishment she needed.

\---------------

By the time she reached her goal, she was glad to duck into the basement rooms that served as a multi-species bar and bakery. Lolar was a gorgeous world, but the white sands and shallow water reflected far too much light for any troll's eyes to comfortably process, shades or no shades.

The patrons did not fall dramatically silent upon her entry -- in these nights, in this universe, legislacerators no longer provoked quite that flavor of terror even on Alternia, and her rank carried no legacy of threat outside the Empire. But there was a definite weight of attention pinned between her shoulders as she threaded her way between tables toward the back of the room. Redglare supposed it was the uniform. Trolls hatched and raised on Skaia's moons had no use for skintight Imperial fashions, or even for clearly displayed symbols and blood colors. She flicked her split lime and teal skirt out of the way and snagged a seat at the bar.

The nearest patrons, a pair of igua and a kodilian, slithered off their seats and moved elsewhere. Redglare measured them at a glance -- small-time muscle and a dealer in questionably legal pharmaceuticals -- and dismissed them as someone else's problem, at least for the moment.

The bartender, a young human woman with dark hair dyed neon blue at the tips, laughed and gossiped with a series of people down at the far end of the bar, ignoring Redglare with a casualness that was so flawless it was obviously fake. Redglare leaned against the edge of the bar -- some type of pressed sand composite, slightly tacky with the residue of drinks long since spilled and wiped away -- and tapped her fingers on her cane in time with the unfamiliar music: a sort of cyclical drone over a pulsing thump. It had an interesting hypnogogic effect. Redglare wondered if it might be useful in certain types of interrogation, if played at subliminal volumes.

Eventually the bartender seemed to feel she'd established her situational power, and ambled over.

"We don't get many legislacerators out this way, and fewer of them have the guts to look official," she said in Alternian Standard. "Do you want a drink, a snack, or a secret?" Her accent was terrible -- the clicks lacked proper resonance, and her trills were vocalized in her throat rather than her head -- but her grammar was perfect, even down to her choice of idiom.

She'd grown up around trolls. She'd probably taught them to speak equally fluent English. In her world, that had never been strange.

Redglare smiled, showing all her teeth despite the connotations that often had in human body language. "All three, I think, though I would say information rather than secrets. I'm looking for a seadweller troll who may have passed through your district in the past six weeks. Symmetric horns with a gentle outward curve, predilection for gaudy jewelry, and last I heard her hair was roughly ankle-length."

"Oh, her," said the bartender. She looked as though she couldn't decide between laughing or grimacing. "She'll be in around Skaia-set if her pattern holds. If you can really get rid of her, your drinks and food are on the house."

Redglare blinked again. Things couldn't possibly be this easy. She'd expected a painstaking search across at least three moons for at least three months, based on how long it had taken her to uncover her target in the previous stages of her hunt. What had changed?

"Hold that thought," she said as she stood. "I'll be back with a warrant, or whatever you use in these parts."

"Around here? A blow to the head does just fine," the bartender said. "But if you want to haul her off-world, let alone out-system, you'll need a bounty token. Drop by the Seers' temple" -- she pointed in the opposite direction to the university and police headquarters -- "and they'll set you up if they think you have good cause."

If she had good cause. That might be tricky. How did one judge crimes committed in a different universe? What was the moral weight of memories that were slowly fading under the passage of peaceful sweeps, and that were contradicted by other, equally true memories of life in this world? The law held no precedents. The warrants she had coaxed from the Empire concerned only theft, gang violence, and several suspiciously convenient riots -- faded miniatures of the Condesce's old ways, and not nearly enough to win a fatal conviction when Redglare inevitably dragged her target back to the homeworld.

And yet, how could she let the former Empress escape from facing her people and admitting the full horrors of her interminable reign? How could any punishment less than death even begin to pay for the extermination of their entire species and the death of the old universe?

"I have excellent cause," Redglare said, "but corroborating testimony never hurts. Why do you want her gone?"

The bartender snorted. "She's a mean drunk and she never pays for what she breaks. My moirail and I are sick of cleaning up after her."

"Nothing more?" Redglare raised her eyebrows above the rims of her shades, inviting the human to elaborate on her claim.

"Nothing I'd admit to the law," the bartender said, and bared her own teeth -- adorably blunt -- in a challenging smile. "The next ferry leaves in twenty minutes. You'd better hurry if you want to get back here in time to catch your girl."

Ah well, she should have expected as much from this kind of bar. "Thank you for your time and advice," Redglare said as she stood from her seat. "I'll be back at planet-set. In the meantime, I suggest you clean up whatever illegal operations you may have in the back rooms, since there's no telling which way 'my girl' will run and as an officer of the law -- even outside my own jurisdiction -- I will of course feel a moral obligation to report any suspicious items I may see while in pursuit."

The bartender twitched, and Redglare allowed herself a smile of her own. She might be getting old, might have lost the idealistic certainties of youth (and the attending conviction of her own immortality) but that didn't mean she'd lost her edge.

"I'd appreciate if you have your version of fried seafood with ketchup and grubsauce, and a bottle of red Faygo waiting when I get back," she added. "On the house." Redglare waited, still smiling, for the bartender to remember her offer and grudgingly agree.

Then she climbed back into the brilliant, greenish mix of yellow-white sunlight and blue planet-light that drenched Lolar's surface, and went in search of a Seer.

**Author's Note:**

> Some further notes on the world-building for this AU are available [here on my journal](http://edenfalling.dreamwidth.org/830976.html), if you're interested.


End file.
